Woo, saw the first, mythical widget call today! I just
instantiated a GtkButton with only an XML description of the
function. I kludged a bit of it, but I can straighten that
out when I get to work on the rest of the generalizations
that I need to do. I probably wouldn't have been able to do
it without help from Jeff Epler, many kudos to him.

9:06am CDT

Ugh, forgot to commit my changes to my CVS server. Guess
I'll be working on something else until the firewall goes
down at noon.

Well, took the code I was working on for Glade and
refactored using GTK code. There's no use rewriting my own
stuff when this will eventually be going into my copy of
Glade(whether it gets accepted is another story). Now I
just need to get the object instantiation up and going, then
I can do a lot of the busy work that will have to get done
before integration. No mythical widget call, but I can
almost feel it ;)

11:32am CDT

Wow, it's been busy lately. Lots of work related stuff to
take care of. Had a good weekend. It was my girlfriend's
birthday Saturday, so we went out Friday(Patriot is a
damn good flick, even if you don't worry about the
historical incongruities) and then went out again with her
parents on Sunday. The more I work with XML, the more
ideas I come up with places it could be used. I think it's
really going to be a huge part of computing in the future.
Things are coming along nicely with the XML widget
definition for Glade. However, I'll probably have to spend
some time refactoring it, because Jeff kindly reminded me
that there was already a linked list type defined in glib(I
forgot :). Maybe I'll see my first widget call today.

Three more days until I fly to Las Vegas for DefCon. It'll
be my first time going to Vegas, so I think I'll have fun.

Well, I guess I didn't get as far along today as I wanted
to. Mostly a combination of Wednesday night TV and not
enough time during the day to work on my project. I think
CBS and TLC are in kahoots, scheduling Survivor and
then right after that 2 hours of Junkyard Wars. I
really didn't know there was that many things you can do
with stuff from a junkyard, it's just amazing. The season
is over for Junkyard Wars though, so maybe it won't
be such a time sink. Maybe things will go faster tomorrow.
Off to read more Into the Darkness before bed.

jpalme2000
brought up Big Brother in his diary entry today and that
reminded me that I always want to post something about that
show. Even though CBS has always said that the show was
started boost ratings, I think they have another motive
behind it. The show plays five days a week, and from the
shows that I watched(before coming to this conclusion) the
people in the house aren't shown that often. Most of the
show is filled with interviews of family members, occasional
happenings in the house, and lots of commercials. With so
little "meat" it's a wonder the show is popular. However,
there is one thing that makes up for all of this. They
have four live feeds(with audio) on their website that run
all the time. The website has plenty of interviews,
goings-on, and ads. I really think that the television show
is just a hook to get people to watch the live cameras on
their website. The feed is continuous, so people can watch
it whenever they like, for as long as it's interesting.
Meanwhile, CBS gets lots of info about how many people are
watching, what banner ads they click, how often the revisit
the site, etc. I really think that CBS is using the show as
a test market for online broadcasting. They don't have
anything to lose with their ratings being as terrible as
they are(were?). I think the Internet is going to see a lot
more of this type of content in the future.

Then again, maybe I'm wrong and CBS is only doing this to
get hits, but JenniCam
and others seem to be making a living off of it.

Well, things are coming along nicely with the XML interface
for Glade's widget palette. A lot of the basic code is
roughed out now. I think I might even be able to call an
XML defined widget by the end of the day tomorrow. That's
the goal I'm setting for myself, anyway. At least I
remembered to put it in CVS so I can check it out from
anywhere.

I think I'm going to finish the evening reading some more
from Into the Darkness by Harry Turtledove, before I
hit the sack. It's a very interesting book so far, with a
LOT of characters. A list of all of the major characters,
which country they are in, and a short description, was
included at the
beginning of the book. I'd certainly be lost without it. I
hope it doesn't rain again tomorrow, I want to ride my bike
into work.

Wow, the Salon article was the first time I'd ever heard of
this site. I've just recently stopped reading Slashdot
because of the terrible misrepresentation of news and
horrible ethic of the people who comment about articles. I
was spending too much time simply trying to sort the
signal from the noise to bother anymore. It's nice to find
somewhere else I can go that looks a like a more friendly
place. These diary entries are very interesting as well(I
just wonder if I can keep mine going :).

Program development has held my interest for a long time. I
started learning C in 1994(I think). Over the years I've
learned a lot, but I really haven't contributed anything to
the open source community. One of my problems that I have
been trying to kick, is that when I get stuck on something,
I tend to give up and go on to something else. I'm very
interested in graphics programming. I've been a member of
SIGGRAPH since December of 1999. OpenGL is probably the 3D
graphics API I am most comfortable with.

Lately(well, since yesterday ;), I've been working on
modifying Glade to have an XML interface for it's supported
widgets, rather than being hard coded into the program. I
was talking to one of my co-workers(Jeff Epler) about how I
didn't like Glade's custom widget, because it wouldn't
generate the code I needed to use with a GtkGLArea widget.
Looking at Glade's source code showed that I would have to
modify the source and recompile to add support for the
widget. Jeff and I then went on to talking about ways of
using object introspection and an XML description of a GTK
widget to allow Glade to populate it's widget palette at run
time. Today, I've been looking at libxml, which looks very
easy to use. More on that later, time to get back to work.

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser
code is live. It needs further work but already handles most
markup better than the original parser.